Note: RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it’s not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the “recent changes” page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

Here’s what Rick has to say on the aqusition:

“I got a feeling it means a slow and agonizing death for all Chinese challengers to the feed throne.

When the general Chinese population pop their RSS cherry (and that may not happen until they discover it via Vista’s desktop widget), whoever is best poised to feed the Chinese Dragon should win out. The Google acquisition surely means that Adwords will be integrated with Feedburner’s service. And throw in on top of that the new Google Gears which looks to deliver RSS offline, and it’ll likely be pushing Feedburner as a big part of that.

I would have to disagree somewhat with the overall sentiment here. I think Feedsky has more to worry about from domestic startups than they do from the overseas giant, Google. In a market saturated by the next great clone, Feedsky already has to look out for competitors like FeedTea who, with the right business model could go on a ‘feeding frenzy’ (sorry, I had to do it).

I think it’s also worth mentioning that there’s nothing the Chinese government likes more than to create a favorable environment for local products (as any country should). If a foriegn company was to really take control of this portion of the technology sector we could see action on the part of the government. We’ve seen forms of protectionism take place from the Mobile sector to the Macroeconomy and there no reason to think they wouldn’t be inclined to take action.

Google is an entity that virtually every company on earth has to be cognizant of given their scale and willingness to move into other business sectors. To say that Feedsky is not keeping an eye on this situation would be folly, but to say that the aquisition, “means a slow and agonizing death for all Chinese challengers to the feed throne” would be the same.

Note: The former Chairman of the Little Red Blog, Will Moss, has given up his throne and returned to blogging (hopefully more regularly) at imagethief. Congratulations on a great year of blogging for Cnet.Asia and I wish all the best to Rick Martin in continuing the Blog. I will certainly be reading.

One Response to “‘Feeding’ The Chinese Dragon”

I am accessing managingthedragon.com via mobile phone from the rss feed and i am only starting out in the blogging world. If the chinese are anywhere near to as voracious technology consumers as i think they are i think it is going to be very interesting king of the hill battle. I am talking about younger chinese of course…